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Eric Candell--Shedding Light |
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Wednesday, October 14, 2015
What we put up with... Do certain things immediately turn you off to a prospective new partner? Perhaps you find out that a person to whom you are initially attracted is a smoker? Or that the person is bipolar? Or uses drugs? Or perhaps you find out that he or she doesn't do drugs! These examples of what we simply won't tolerate in a potential partner are quite personal and may well differ for you and others. Lately, I have been curious to think about what it means to consider the things that we do put up with in a partner and the things that we don't. Does it reveal anything interesting about you that you are willing to engage in certain dynamics that others would determine are an instant turn-off. Let's suppose that when you start dating somebody, you find out after your initial courtship that your dating partner is perpetually late. Repeatedly, he shows up 20 minutes late to plans that you make. He doesn't call you to tell you beforehand that he will not make the appointment. You express frustration, and he apologizes, saying that he was caught up with something important at work or got a phone call from a family member. He always has a reason for his tardiness. For some people, this would fall in the category of instantly turning them off. They would decide that it is simply unacceptable that they would forge a relationship with somebody who cannot keep basic promises with their schedule. They would see this behavior as a sign of something basically incompatible with how they live their lives. For you, though, you are frustrated by these continual disappointments, and you mention your irritation, but you also communicate, on some level, that lateness does not break the deal for you. It just annoys you, but you will eventually put it aside and create an implicit rule in your relationship that lateness is annoying, but it is tolerated. Again, I am not trying to imply that you should or should not tolerate lateness. I'm pointing out that we all have different senses of what it means for our partner to be late. If you are in the first category where it simply is a deal breaker, the relationship won't move forward without immediate shift of the perpetually late partner. In the second category, lateness will prevail. What guesses might we make about the person who sees lateness as absolutely unacceptable? I can certainly imagine that this person might have come from a family where people talked about being on time and holding to commitments as paramount. If people didn't show up on time, this person's family might have communicated norms about how lateness is not something to tolerate. The family might have looked down on people who couldn't hold to a schedule or would view it as self-centered that somebody would ignore their social obligations. You might also imagine that somebody could get to an absolute around lateness in nearly the opposite family system. Perhaps being around a perpetually late parent who left you waiting at school pickup would teach you firsthand that you don't want to deal with such behaviors. You might have decided that you will never let yourself be treated the way that you saw others in your life get treated. This position is trickier. You may still have contact with the late people in your life. Adopting norms in your new family that differ from your old family takes additional effort. If you are more in the camp that you tolerate lateness, you might have learned that demanding compliance to commitments is not something that you can reasonably attain in your relationships and so you are not willing to lose a relationship for the sake of this "right" that you never had in the first place. It's possible that you might even see lateness as a valid choice and accept a credo that people should not depend on the timely arrival of others. You may see schedules as a rigid constraint placed on creative people. If this is so, the issue of lateness might not even arise in your relationship as a point of tension. When we enter into relationships, we are often exposed to our own tolerances and our own presumptions about what values and norms matter in a family. We all struggle to assert our own sense of what is right as we define a new family system. And we all will see something important about ourselves as we notice which rights we can easily claim and which rights we struggle to defend. Labels: intimacy, relationships, tolerance Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Sorting Out Jealousy If you are finding yourself jealous of your partner--afraid that your partner will leave you or cheat on you--how do you find peace? You feel crazy imagining all of the things that could go wrong, and yet you cannot shut off the thoughts that make you feel you have a right to your suspicions. You get even more confusing data when your partner won't take your concerns seriously and gets angry that you are imagining these outcomes. If your partner is jealous of you--assuming that you will cheat on your partner and sneak in some illicit encounters--how do you find peace? You know what you are doing, and you know that there is not a legitimate concern about your behaviors, and yet you feel powerless to say anything that will set your partner at ease. In fact, you see how your attempts to calm things down actually can be used as evidence that you are doing something wrong. You might take it personally that your partner can't take your word at face value. Was your relationship always like this? Did you, the jealous person, begin suspecting that your new partner was looking for opportunities to sneak off on you? Almost certainly, you did not. In fact, you probably started the relationship with the belief that you finally found somebody who would never leave you, would never betray you, would always be loyal. You imagined that your new love would get her needs met by you and you would be completely satisfying such that there would be no reason to look for anything else beyond this new relationship. And, as the person who is accused of having her eye on other interests, you probably felt the allure of this initial optimism from your new love. You felt that this person appreciated you as a rare find and saw you as trustworthy (either because you are trustworthy or because you wish you were). Jealousy only starts to surface when the initial fantasies of a perfect relationship break down. At some point, you start seeing the truth that your partner will not be completely satisfied with you. Your partner will start to want things that you cannot provide. This breakdown will happen even in the best of relationships. Even the best of relationships would have elements of disappointment and partial satisfaction. When this transition starts to occur, suddenly the safety of your relationship feels threatened. If you could see it as a normal transition--that of course this notion that you could satisfy all needs alluring but wrong--and if you could imagine that the partner you have chosen also understands and accepts that there will be disappointments from the ideal--you might both tolerate the loss that is occurring. You might start to transition to a different relationship in which you and your partner accept the ways in which you want your relationship to evolve to make it more satisfying and to struggle with accepting the imperfection of coupling. Instead, you may both try to keep the initial fantasy alive. Your jealousy picks up on the truth that you are disappointment to your partner, but you cannot tolerate that idea. So, you signal to your partner that you want absolute commitment. Your partner sees that you are insecure about being seen as disappointing in any way, and so tries to reassure you that a) they have no desires for anything more (which you know is not true because it is not true in any relationship) and b) they are not capable of cheating on you anyway (which you know is not technically true either because you believe that people are not good at tolerating their disappointments). So begins the spiral of jealousy that you and your partner will co-create. You will insist on being fully satisfying. Your partner will assure you that nothing else could be the case. Meanwhile, your partner is starting to see how needy you are, and you are starting to see how naive your partner and it just leads to more escalation and more crazy-making demands and assurances. Can you escape this cycle? If you are the jealous partner, you might have to unilaterally accept the following:
If you are the partner of somebody who is jealous, you may have to communicate the following:
At the heart of jealousy--and the heart of getting past it--is wrestling with the fantasy that there is a person out there who will fully charmed by all aspects of who you are and will choose you without regret. The idea of the "one and only" is a myth and mature couples need to grapple with the truth that long-term committed relationships are sometimes disappointing and unfulfilling, at least some of the time. Mutual hiding from this truth is the fuel of the jealous relationship.
Labels: couples therapy, intimacy, jealousy, marriage, relationships Friday, October 09, 2015
Regime Change Many of us imagine making changes in our relationships. We may feel fervently that things need to change in our relationships for us to remain within them. But, how likely are you to bring about a fundamental change in the dynamic with your marital partner or in your family? I would make the claim that making such changes is a fairly rare occurrence. We often blame professionals (like myself--marriage counselors) because they often fail to bring about the change that would be required to make a relationship more satisfying. In reality, it takes rare people to take the risks and sustain the pressures to bring about the change in a family/couple dynamic that truly endure. In recent months, I have found it interesting to think about what changes the world on a greater societal level and to imagine what ways such change mirrors the private changes in our personal worlds. What does it take to get fundamentally new rights for people who are oppressed? What would it entail to reform the way we educate students? What does it take to overthrow a regime and bring about wholesale reform in the values of a group of people. Perhaps it is too extreme to make such comparisons. After all, you probably think of these changes as well beyond anything you might be capable of bringing about. And yet, the complexity of these changes stems from the way in which they require shaking loose from a deeply entrenched paradigm. Such paradigms are often foundational to whole subgroups of citizens and the ways they believe the world works. They form the bedrock of so many comfortable ideals and rituals. I would make the claim that many marital issues stem from very similar foundational systemic realities and that getting a different paradigm to prevail will take similar upheaval and strength. I remember watching SELMA, the recent documentary about Martin Luther King, Jr. The courage that it took for African American citizens to go into a restaurant at which they were not welcome and to stand up to the existing regime, only to get beaten down brutally, again and again, was almost painful to watch. These people were breaking laws. They had government officials literally beating them up. And yet they persevered. They stayed organized and focused against great personal threat. They required intense support and leadership. And even with all this effort, you might even agree that there is still work to do to really change the civil rights for African Americans today. Often in relationships, the person who wants to make a change faces similar opposition. Usually one person in a relationship becomes uncomfortable with the status quo and while a potential change could make life better for that one person, there is often another person who has similar motivations to keep things as they have always been. That person feels comfort in the original arrangement and the evolution of that original arrangement almost certainly lines up nicely with the arrangement that both people came from in their pasts. How many of us have the strength to see the wrongness of our current relationship AND stick with the inevitable opposition that will arise when we try to bring about something different? We might try and fail and the cost to our own stability if that occurs is often quite high (we might destroy the relationship in the process of trying and then have to face financial and psychological realities of being on our own). So many forces will try to revert things to the way that we have originally set things up. We will likely alienate our support system as we try to make changes--after all, some of the ways we established our relationship comes from our support system. If you are demoralized about your relationship, one way to think about your frustration is to question what rights you want to fight for that you don't really have today. Be careful about assuming that rights that exist in the broader world also exist in the privacy of your own home. To really change your relationship often requires a deeper understanding of the "regime" under which you currently live. When you start to understand that regime, sometimes you might be horrified to see what you have co-created with a partner whom you "love". And when you think about what it will take to change the regime to give you rights you think you might desire, you might see even more darkness about your partner and yourself. In the face of that revelation, are you willing to stick with your convictions, organize yourself for the long haul, strategize and hold yourself to a plan? Don't expect relationship change to come easily to you. People talk about how relationships are hard, but I think we don't realize the degree to which fundamentally changing any system--even a system that consists of just two people--requires nearly heroic effort that will push us to the limit of what we think we can reasonably handle. Given these demands, we should have some reverence for people who struggle with such changes--even if they fail--and recognize that the odds are quite low, albeit worth a lifetime of work for those who care enough to try. Thursday, October 08, 2015
Do you hate your partner? If you are reading this, there is a very good chance that you are not satisfied in your romantic relationship. You might feel that the problems between you and your partner are insurmountable and feel frustrated with the way that these problems seem to stick around. But, would you go so far as to say that you hate your partner? Hate is a very strong word, but then again, love relationships are very emotional places. If you are likely to hate anybody, your marital partner is not entirely a bad candidate to place some of these feelings. After all, there is no other person in your life that has as much of an influence on how you live your life than the person with whom you share it. For all the talk about love in intimate relationships, we are quite a bit less comfortable with the idea that most of us feel some hatred to our partners. But, when we are honest with ourselves, most of us can connect to some of these feelings. And the good news is that it is not necessarily a sign that something is going wrong. What are some of the reasons that you rightfully hate your partner:
Years of exposure to a partner who is willing to continue in ways that provably upset you--that certainly doesn't make us feel good about somebody and the longer it goes on, the more good sense it makes for you to feel extreme feelings towards the person who engages with you in this way.
You might connect to these feelings and wonder,
Hatred is one of those feelings that we are told to hide. If you are a parent and you have heard your child say that they hate somebody (especially you), you know that it is quite natural to give a clear message to your child that it is never okay to say such things. From a very early age, we all receive clear messages of shame when we express hatred. For all our rhetoric about being entitled to our feelings, you were probably not entitled to your hatred from a very young age.
Frankly, hatred makes us very uncomfortable. We don't like the idea that people would or even could hate, but it is also clear that full-on hatred is not uncommonly experienced by you and most everyone around you.
Accepting hatred is often a first step in tempering our hateful feelings.
Perhaps the first step in turning around these feelings is to acknowledge the hatred you feel. Initially, this might mean that you accept the intensity of these reactions to yourself. You might allow for the fact that this is not something flawed in you that you feel so strongly and negatively to the person you allegedly chose to marry. Also accepting that given the nature of emotionally committed relationships, it's not even terribly surprising that you would feel this strongly. It's not necessarily as sign that something is going wrong. I you go back to look at the list above, some of the things that you hate might also be things that you would expect to come from a life shared with another person.
You might also think about (and try to accept) that some of the same reasons that you hate your spouse might also cause your spouse to hate you. After all, you are a constraint on your spouse's life too, much like he or she constraints your life.
You may also consider communicating your hatred to your spouse. But, be careful about what your intentions are in this communication. If you hate your spouse, there is a very good chance that your spouse already knows this. It's very hard to hide one's hatred. Your actions and attitude and responses all give a reasonably clear impression. So, before you communicate your hatred, try to remember that your spouse already knows.
If you goal is not to share new information about the hatred, then you might wonder, "Why communicate it at all--it's already communicated". This is true, but what you might not be communicating is your own acceptance of that hatred. If you can communicate in a calmer moment that you hate your spouse, that you understand why you hate your spouse, and that you don't even necessarily see it as some pathological state of the relationship, you MAY be providing some new information. You might also be able to "out" your spouse about the fact that you know that they know about your hatred. In this sense, there is often a collusion around marital hatred where it is obviously there, but both parties agree to ignore it. The result is that it grows a shameful quality that actually makes it worse--and certainly doesn't make it go away.
Tolerating the hatred of a partner and developing an understanding and acceptance of these feelings will change the way it gets expressed in your relationship, sometimes with surprising effects.
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